Snicker, snort

Way back in the early days of playing WoW, a common complaint was the AV leeches (or AV campers). Alterac Valley was a fairly large battleground. Lots of effort, lots of dying. At some point (I don’t recall when and it doesn’t matter) Blizzard decided to give points just for being there. And thence came the leeches, the campers, who would enter the game, run to some out-of-the-way corner, and go afk for a while. AFK farming has always annoyed me — at least as much as bots, frankly. If you’re going to play, play. Anyway, Blizzard eventually, over several patches and upgrades, eliminated it. They did so with plenty of warning from the various patch notes.

Enter EVE. The AFK farming here is Faction Warfare (FW) farming. Pop into an area, your presence contributes to success, and you get lots of points that you can use to purchase niftiness. As with most economies, the flood of wealth moved the price of other popular things – like PLEXES (my particular issue) – upward. After all if everyone is buying the things, why not? (Inevitable digression – I’m not sure this is the only or even the main contributor to the rising PLEX prices. But it is a contributor.)

Anyway, CCP had a bit of fun. They announced today that they were killing the AFK farming. Basically you can’t just jump in and sit around while others do the killing. If you don’t at least damage the NPCs, you don’t get LPs. And the nature of the game, of course, is that once you shoot you will be hunted — afk is bad for survival. There are also a number of changes to how much you can buy with your accumulated LP points. Prices (for Points) are going up a lot.

Actually they’ve warned for a while they were going to do it. What they announced today was that they were implementing this change two months early. To be specific, at the next server roll-over. Less than 24 hours (less than 8 as I write this). The farmers are going nuts. They thought they’d have plenty of time to load up on stuff then sell it when the prices changed. Now, they’re feeling short-changed.

Well, the ones who read the developer blogs. Or who pay attention to the change notices at start-up. Which, let’s face it, isn’t typical of most players much less those into AFK playing.

I’m giggling. I caught a couple of conversations, and I’m full of glee.

About…

I've experience with many priests of many races and specs on several servers. The more I play, the more I realize how much I do not yet know. This is a share of some of what I have learned.
My main these days is Zingiber on the Undermine server.